Samsung announced its acquisition of LoopPay last month, a company with some interesting mobile payment tech. At the time we wondered whether some of that LoopPay magic would find itself into the Galaxy S6 in time for launch, and today in Barcelona, Samsung confirmed that it very much did, introducing Samsung Pay for the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge.

Samsung Pay intends to give users more mobile payment options than maybe any other system out there, combining the ability to conduct transactions over Magnetic Secure Transmission technology. The key difference there is that MST emulates a physical credit card swipe; to the point-of-sale payment terminal, it looks like you’re just running a regular credit card. In doing so, Samsung Pay offers secure mobile payments in areas where contactless or other smartphone-specific payment hardware isn’t available.

All told, Samsung says that Samsung Pay should work at 30 million merchants around the globe, giving users of the company’s smartphones plenty of opportunities to use their handsets to conduct mobile payments.

For security, Samsung Pay uses tokenization to keep your personal payment data private, and the fingerprint scanning hardware in the company’s smartphones adds an extra layer of protection. On the phones themselves, Samsung Knox and ARM TrustZone work in concert to help prevent attacks on this payment infrastructure.

Initial availability of Samsung Pay will be in South Korea and the United States, beginning sometime this summer. Access will expand to China and nations in Europe at a later date.

Stephen has been writing about electronics since 2008, which only serves to frustrate him that he waited so long to combine his love of gadgets and his degree in writing. In his spare time, he collects console and arcade game hardware, is a motorcycle enthusiast, and enjoys trapping blue crabs. Stephen's first mobile device was a 624 MHz Dell Axim X30, which he's convinced is still a viable platform. Stephen longs for a market where phones are sold independently of service, and bandwidth is cheap and plentiful; he's not holding his breath. In the meantime, he devours smartphone news and tries to sort out the juicy bits
Read more about Stephen Schenck!